with dickens you have to hang to mrs. gamp if you're going to play her, as i have done. it's a very exhilarating experience but you need to be in very good shape to do it. >> charlie: robert, you have written that dickens is still becoming dickens. what did you mean? >> well i mean is that the shape of dickens in our minds, the way we understand dickens is always changing. i said earlier that sometimes he used a page like a distorting mirror. but he's also like a distorting mirror that we hold off to our own concerns. so at the moment, for instance, riots in london, we think about bankers, little doris. we think about riches being bestowed on people who don't deserve them. that of course is great ex-peck tastes. where have we looked for contemporary parallels and echos? we find them in dickens. >> charlie: you quote in the epi gram of "becoming dickens" there's a line from oscar wild which says one's real life is so often the life that one does not lead. why did you choose that? >> because dickens realized early on that he was going to have to choose some part in life. h